First Google earth and now the sun

Google has teamed up with US private equity group KKR for its latest foray into renewable energy, investing $94 million in four solar farms that will provide power to 13,000 homes in California.

It is the online search and advertising group’s first investment in a solar project, which supplies electricity directly into the grid.

Google pledged in 2007 to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on renewable energy such as solar and wind power to make them competitive with coal. Scientists including James Hansen, who heads the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the US, believe that coal-power plants, which emit twice as much carbon as gas plants, pose the biggest threat to the climate.